Ed Belfour was trying to forget about the slump. It was All-Star Weekend, a time when he is accustomed to playing, but instead he had jetted to Cozumel for some scuba diving with friends. He figured it was a good way to relieve some of the exhaustion he'd built up over two straight years of reaching the Stanley Cup Finals. The water was crystal clear, and as Belfour dove to the bottom, he noticed his partner, a young woman, was uncomfortable with her tank. Seeing a chance to be gallant, he tried helping her by unfastening the tank so he could reposition it.

There was just one problem: The woman was petrified. She wasn't sure what he was trying to do, but there was nothing in the face behind his mask that suggested she should be calm.

Former teammate and fellow diver Blake Sloan laughs when he tells this story. "It's just so Ed. The guy tries to help but ..." Sloan stops himself, groping for the positive spin, not wanting to summon the image of what an underwater, stubble-covered Eagle might look like. "Well," Sloan says finally, "she was fine when we all got to the surface."

It's the perfect story about the grumpy goalie who desperately wants to be liked and keeps stepping on his own good intentions. Belfour grew up in Carman, Manitoba, a farm town near the North Dakota border, with a '69 Charger and a hunger for drag racing. Now, a Stanley Cup and many millions later, he should be enjoying the second-to-last year of his $5.5 million-a-year deal with the Stars. So why is it so easy to imagine him pulling up to a traffic light and shooting some kid in a Corvette a sidelong challenge? And why is it just as easy to imagine the kid backing off, freaked out by those cold blue eyes set deep in that ghostly white face?

In January, the Stars got their own taste of that edge when Belfour went AWOL on them, leading to three high-wire days of negotiations and a showdown in an Atlanta hotel that Stars coach Ken Hitchcock calls "as intense a two hours as I've ever had in sports." It's not the first time he's detoured before reminding his team how much it needs him -- and his gaudy .920 postseason save rate -- with the playoffs looming. A year ago, he was arrested for kicking and spitting at a cop in a drunken hotel fracas. After a quick guilty plea to a misdemeanor charge of resisting arrest, Belfour almost single-handedly lugged the Stars to the Stanley Cup Finals. This time, though, Stargazers have been left to wonder if their franchise goalie might be starting to burn out. If so, the timing couldn't be worse. The Stars have a razor-slim hold on first place in the Pacific Division, with two key threats, center Joe Nieuwendyk and right wing Jamie Langenbrunner, on injured reserve. If they slip into second, they'll be left to face St. Louis or Detroit on the road in the first round instead of San Jose, Vancouver or Edmonton at home. And the Stars haven't been bounced that early since before Belfour arrived in July 1997.

Now, in a video room at the Stars' suburban Dallas training center (down the street from the Cowboys' camp), Belfour studies a tape of his last performance, allowing a smile to raise from the corners of his lips. The goals he let past in the Stars' 6-2 win over Minnesota on Feb. 21 seem unavoidable, a case of the odds simply cashing in for a night. "My timing looks good," he says, shifting an ice pack on his back. "The way I'm seeing the puck now, I really don't see a reason why this team can't win another Stanley Cup."

If he'd had more money growing up in that farm town of his, he'd be sitting in a dragster instead of standing in the crease, squinting to see frozen rubber flying at him at 100 mph. "The only thing that got me into hockey is that we weren't rich," Belfour says. "It costs money to get into racing." Now, of course, Eddie the Eagle has a four-seat Cessna and a roomy Sea Ray sailboat to go along with a speedboat for which he's building a 1,000-horsepower motor. He has many retreats, too: a place near the garage he owns in Freeland, Mich., where he restores muscle cars; the apartment in Chicago where he visits his ex-wife and two kids; a spot on a deserted stretch near the Oklahoma-Arkansas border where he hunts deer. Not far from there lies his refuge, a houseboat surrounded by bass where he goes "when I need to disappear."

A man who spends his life under fire is entitled to live his life at a safe remove, to be happiest when he's alone and refurbishing a 1939 Ford. But Belfour isn't nearly as indifferent as he seems. This is, after all, a man who scrupulously saves his masks and sticks and then turns around and sells them on the Web. He's right to believe in their worth (he rakes in as much as $3,200 for an authentic replica mask and $600 for a signed, game-used stick); after all, he's played in more postseason games than The Dominator and blew out Patrick Roy in the past two Western Conference finals. And he's entitled to feel slighted when he ventures that he's "as good or better than" Roy, only to be hammered by the press for hubris. "Some goalies are flipping and flopping to make the save look hard," he says, his voice hinting at anger. "But you don't have to do that." The blue-jean cynic inside of him wants to walk away, to deal with the world through sound bites and eBay. There's just one problem: The one thing he craves requires some personal salesmanship. Belfour spent seven years in Chicago studying under Vladislav Tretiak, the Russian legend who calls Ed "my pride." The goalie god collected four Olympic medals in his career, and he passed the five-ring fever (along with his number, 20) to his protégé. But after a decade, Belfour is still waiting for the call. In 1998, the first Olympics in which current NHL stars were eligible to compete, Belfour was passed over in favor of the more personable trio of Martin Brodeur, Curtis Joseph and Roy. To make the snub more painful, Dallas GM Bob Gainey served as second in command on the Canadian selection committee. Not wanting to bury any last chance he might have for 2002, Belfour whispers, "It would be an honor to represent my country. It would be a dream for me." But as he says it, his face twists, as if it takes all the self-control he can muster to avoid making the accusation he believes completely: that if he were a better politician, he might have a medal hanging in his houseboat.

Because he's not, he's created belfour.com to subtly polish his image. On the site, you can see pics of Ed scuba diving, buy his jerseys, play the Eddie word-search game (Glovesave! Shutout!). And if you really want to have fun, you can go to the kids' page and help him color his image, which he worked hard to tarnish with that walkout this winter.

Belfour has played behind some terrific defenses in Chicago and Dallas, and maybe that has spoiled him a bit. Early this season, Dallas retooled its forward lines with young players, and Hitchcock opted to experiment with his defensive pairings. The changes punched holes in the Stars' usually rock-solid team defense. "We started giving up two-on-ones and quality chances," Hitchcock says. "And that bothered Ed. The odd-man rushes really bothered him." All of a sudden, steady Eddie was facing more quality chances than at any time during his previous three seasons in Dallas.

"Ed had been in this zone," Gainey says. "It wasn't a two- or three-month zone. It was a 14-month zone." And over the season's first 25 games, Belfour was still deep in it. He had a .925 save percentage and a league-leading seven shutouts, three of them in a row. But then, seemingly out of nowhere, he ran into the kind of thing that gives every athlete on the north side of 30 the shakes -- a slump he couldn't explain. In a December that saw his save rate plummet, he surrendered 10 goals on 37 shots in back-to-back games against the Wild and the Devils. "I was just playing a little average," he says, trying to be casual.

In the best of times, Belfour's as casual as a coronary. His range of motion is astonishingly narrow, and he stands in the crease like a virtual statue. His anticipation is more analytic than instinctive. He positions his body so that pucks bounce off it and drop harmlessly, and because he's a tidy goalie, he flicks them safely into the corner, almost never into the slot. He builds his own skates, tempering the blades with curves on the toe and heel that help him skip quickly to his left from a dead stop. He tapes the knob of his custom-made stick the same number of times every night, always in the same direction. In his search for the perfect stuffing for his pads, he even once used hair from a deer.

All of which makes the events of December so puzzling. Because for the life of him, Ed couldn't figure out what was the matter with his game. His normally quartz-like timing evaporated. He'd set himself in the crease, then move out and set himself again, a tic akin to a quarterback tapping the ball during a three-step drop. His moods grew so dark when he watched himself after losses that the team's video technician quietly suggested he wait until the Stars won a game before coming in again. (Now he waits for wins before he looks at his losses.)

As dark as his moods got, though, no one saw the meltdown of Jan. 6 coming. It was a chilly morning in Boston when Hitchcock told Belfour that he was going to start backup Marty Turco that evening and he wanted Ed to help the team take practice, a backup's duty. "He's a very proud athlete," says Bruins coach Mike Keenan, who coached Belfour in Chicago. "He wants to compete and he doesn't get off the ice easily." (In a famous diva moment, Belfour once reportedly turned to his understudy, Jeff Hackett, and huffed, "You'll never be more than a backup.") "When I don't feel respected or I feel I'm being taken for granted, I get upset," Belfour says. "I've been in this league long enough that I feel I deserve respect. And when there's disrespect, I'm not going to be happy."

But Belfour didn't brood. He bolted. He packed his bags and flew back to Dallas. "I need a break," he told Buddy Voth, a childhood friend who lives nearby and manages Eagle Enterprises. "It's all getting too crazy."

After three days of phone calls and long discussions with his father, wondering whether he should call it a career or force a trade as he did in his last days in Chicago, Belfour agreed to meet with Hitchcock and Gainey at the team's hotel in Atlanta. They sat at a large, round table with no food on it; the tension piled high instead. You don't disrespect me like that, Belfour yelled. Don't tell me how to run my team, Hitchcock yelled back.

"Management had to paint the big picture of what it meant to be a Dallas Star," the coach says now. "They had to sell the sweater." Gainey just seems relieved that the episode didn't blow up. "Hey, he could have hit the coach or left Dallas," sighs the GM. "I mean, his course of action wasn't the best, but it didn't mortally wound anyone. This is a team sport, for chrissake. We're not altar boys."

Belfour seems more embarrassed than defiant, as if somehow he thought no one would notice. But when he rejoined the team in Atlanta on Jan. 10 as Turco's backup, he looked up to see fans with signs reading "Eddie the Weasel." "Maybe I didn't handle it the right way at the time, but I agree, it could have been worse," he says now. "I mean, some good has come out of it. I feel a lot better since it's happened."

One reason is that the Stars have gone from being one of the youngest teams in the league to the second oldest. Center Kirk Muller, 35, just came off injured reserve, wings John MacLean, 36, and Benoit Hogue, 34, were midseason acquisitions and Gainey picked up 39-year-old defenseman Grant Ledyard at the trade deadline. The infusion of veterans seems to have settled things down. Since the All-Star break, the Stars have gone 10-7-1, sneaking past slumping San Jose in the standings and recapturing, for now, home ice in the first round.

But if the Stars don't go deep into the playoffs, Belfour may find himself wondering whether the damage he did to his Olympic bid made the walkout worthwhile. He looks in the mirror enough to know what the rest of the hockey world sees, that no matter how much work he does for the Make-A-Wish Foundation, or a hundred other charities, he'll always come off like a cross-country trucker on the wrong end of the midnight shift. After carrying the Stars on his back for two years, those critics were starting to soften and the Olympic buzz was discernable. Now, nothing short of a Stanley Cup may get them back. Funny, that could be all the fuel this wannabe racer needs.

This article appears in the April 2 issue of ESPN The Magazine. E-mail Shaun Assael at shaun.assael@espnmag.com.